By eleven he had resigned himself. She would come or she would not come; the choice was not his. Perhaps her husband would come instead. He was too lethargic to be concerned. A cold flame ran over his body, and he tried to concentrate upon conversations out in the hall…the sound of a toilet flushing nearby…traffic down on the boulevard…something to fix him to himself, to draw him out of being only a body waiting to fall in agony upon another body. It was shameful to be Jules and to be such a creature. It was a betrayal of the true Jules.
The telephone rang. It was twenty after eleven. It rang one short ring, and Jules picked it up at once. “Hello?” he said shakily.
“Hello,” said Nadine.
“Well, where are you?” he said.
She said, “I’m still at home—”
“At home? Why at home?” he said. His exasperation gave him something to get hold of—he felt that he hated her.
“Do you still want me to come down?” she said.
Jules said nothing.
“I haven’t slept all night. I don’t feel well. I…Jules? Are you there?”
“Sure.”
“Do you still want me to come down?”
“It’s up to you.”
“Yes, I’ll come down.”
He hung up. His anger aroused him. He paced back and forth from the bathroom to the window to the bed, rubbing his cold hands. He had been in a state of near shock, his body hadn’t been his own, and this flood of anger was like hot liquid streaming through him. Yet his hands were cold, his feet were cold. He looked at his watch and calculated it would take her at least half an hour to get down, probably an hour.
He went downstairs and had a glass of beer. He came back upstairs, thinking she might have arrived while he was gone. He opened the door of his room: an empty room. He lay on his bed again. He waited.
Someone knocked at the door.
He jumped up to let her in. Now everything was simple, hurried. They embraced, they exclaimed greetings.
“You really came, you’re really here,” he said.
Nadine laughed. “Didn’t you believe me?”
“But you’re trembling. Sit down. Sit over here.”
Graciously he led her to the only chair in the room. He knelt beside her. He kissed her knees. Nadine put her hand on the back of his head, leaning over him. He could feel her fear and his own exaltation, teasing each other.
“I wasn’t going to come, that’s why I called you,” she said quickly, “because I don’t feel well this morning. I’m sort of sick—”
“What’s wrong?”
“I couldn’t sleep all night. I was awake all night.”
“I was awake too.”
“Now I’m sort of sick. I mean…I’m not well.”
“Honey, sit still. Don’t be so nervous. We can talk to each other, we have years of talking ahead. What do you want me to do for you? Room service? Do you want lunch, champagne? Is it time for lunch? I can have them send up some out-of-town newspapers. I can stand on my head for you, sweetheart, only don’t look so miserable.”
“But I’m not well. It started last night.”
“What?”
“Cramps. It started last night.”
Jules caressed her long silky legs in silence. He stared at them, then at the carpet. It was a dull colorless gold, not very clean. He stared at the individual bits of yarn, pressed down by Nadine’s white shoes and his own knees.
“I shouldn’t have come down here then. Probably…”
“It’s all right.”
“Jules, I love you so, I’m sorry.”
“Do you want an aspirin or something? Something to drink?”
“No.”
“How bad is it?”
“I feel a little faint, I…”
Jules remained kneeling. He pressed his face against her knees in submission and felt a terror at his own helplessness. Even the pain in her loins was something he had no control over, something he could not stop. Everything was private. Nadine caressed the back of his neck eagerly. “I couldn’t seem to get hold of myself last night. I was very upset—it was like a nightmare. I kept walking around the house, wondering how people get through the night, particularly women. You know, Jules, a man’s love creates a woman’s love. You’ve made me the way I am. I’m certain of that. There are men who are permanent in a woman’s life, everything in them is permanent, and terrible, nobody thinks about them That’s something I set out to do; there’s no choice about it. You love me and I love you, I don’t have any choice about it.”
Jules made an exasperated sound, a kind of laugh. “I suppose that makes sense,” he said.
“But don’t you want me to talk to you?” she said. “Are you angry?”
He got up. “Of course I’m not angry.”
“It’s so strange for me to be here, to be saying these things to you. You’re one of the people who couldn’t visit me if I was sick, or come to my funeral.”
“Why not?”
“You wouldn’t come. Probably you wouldn’t know about it.”
“Probably not. Nobody would tell me. Are you thinking of dying?”
Nadine laughed nervously. “My husband has a gun—”
“Where?”
“At home, a gun. I took it out last night. I looked at it and thought that it was a mysterious thing, a gun. I went to the mirror and put the gun up to my head and stood looking at myself for a while.”
“Why the hell did you do that?”
“Don’t be angry, there wasn’t any danger. But it was very interesting, seeing myself like that.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m just afraid.”
“But it’s just me, Jules. I’m only a man. I’m a wreck. Why should you be afraid of me?” He sat on the edge of the bed and faced her. He felt a moron’s good will showing on his face.
“I do love you,” Nadine said softly.
“So much that you want to shoot yourself?”
“I don’t want to shoot myself.”
“Who do you want to shoot then?”
“Nobody. I don’t want to do anything. I want to live a good, simple life. I want to put my faith in things that are simple and clear. That’s all a woman asks. I want to put my life in order.”
“That isn’t easy to do,” Jules said.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“About your past?”
“I don’t have any past, sweetheart.”
“Don’t make jokes.”
“That wasn’t a joke.”
“Your past—what you did last week, last year. I want to know about your life.”
“In terms of what?”
“You never got married?”
“No.”
“Were you close to getting married?”
“Never.”
“What do you think about…about getting married?”
“To you? I want to marry you.”
She smiled shyly. “But I really don’t have much money, not really, maybe you’d be sorry. I’d be off on my own, divorced. Would you want me then?”
“Of course I would.”
“But…have you ever been in love? With anyone else?”
“No.”
“Are you serious?”
“I haven’t been in love, no. Except with you. This is it, the end. I don’t want to be in love or even think about it any more, except with you. This is the end of it.”
She leaned toward him and pressed her lips against his cheek. He could not make sense of Nadine or of himself. If nature was driving him toward her, forcing him to an act of love with this particular woman, the excess of feeling he had to endure was overwhelming as lava: suffocating and preposterous, a kind of joke. Surely all this was not going to end in the conception of a child? Detroit was packed with children.
br /> “Have you made love to many women?”
“No.”
“Haven’t you?”
“I can’t remember. I’ve forgotten.”
“Why don’t you tell me the truth?”
“All you want to hear is dirt, so why should I tell you about it? Your idea of the past is dirt,” Jules said. “Forget everything that’s over with. It doesn’t belong to us.”
“But I want to know everything about you.”
“Well, you’re not going to. It’s over.”
“Don’t you want to know about me?”
“As conversation, yes. For the next thirty years. But it isn’t essential. I can’t concentrate on it. I can’t even ask you whether you’ve had any lovers since your marriage, or before, because that isn’t any of my business.”
“Of course I haven’t.”
“All right. Good.”
She was silent. She drew back from him. “Well,” she said. “I think I should leave now.”
“Leave?”
“Someone downstairs recognized me, I’m sure of it. She looked at me in a certain way.”
“So what?”
“I…I think I should go back home.”
Jules made a sad, sucking noise with his mouth.
“Jules, listen,” she said quickly. “Don’t hate me. But I’ve always thought, I’ve always been afraid, that you might have some kind of disease. You know.”
Jules felt as if something cold had been dumped over him. He stared at her. Then, turning it into a joke, he tried to smile. “No, sweetheart. I’m all right.”
“I was always terrified of that.”
“I don’t have syphilis.”
“I was thinking of where you lived, the way things are in the city, and Negro women, girls—”
“No.”
“Have you ever…with Negro women?”
Jules rubbed his eyes. Since the experimental program he’d hired himself out for years ago, his eyes often ached, particularly when he was troubled. They began to water. “Why is everything in your mind dirt, your imagination all dirt?” he asked in anguish.
“Don’t say that!”
“Oh, Jesus!”
They were silent for a while, not looking at each other. After a while Jules said, “You can leave if you want to.”
“I’ll call you in a few days.”
“You’ll never call.”
“Yes, I will.”
She lay back in the chair, one hand across her stomach. “I will call you, Jules. It’s just that I’m sick. I took some pills to keep the pain down but they didn’t work. I should be in bed, I shouldn’t have come down here to bother you. How can I help it that this happened to me?”
“Did you expect it?”
“Not until next week.”
“Well, obviously you made it happen,” Jules said with an effort toward tenderness. “Not that I blame you or have any special opinion. I’m sorry you’re in pain.”
“I parked my car just across the street.”
“Did you? Let’s see the stub.”
“Why do you want to see it? Don’t you believe me?”
“Let’s see.”
She showed him the little cardboard stub.
“Yes, the same place. I used to work there,” Jules said.
“In that parking lot?”
“Parking cars, yes. When I was a kid.”
Nadine looked through her purse. “I don’t think I have enough money to pay for this. I didn’t bring any money along at all.”
“I’ll pay for it,” said Jules.
“But…why didn’t I bring any money? I went out without any money.” She looked through her purse, exasperated. She seemed quite helpless.
“I’ll be glad to pay for it.”
He saw a single tear fall from her cheek and into the purse, and was touched by the sight. He did love her after all.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Nadine said.
He gave her a ten-dollar bill.
She thanked him and put it carefully in her purse. She took the stub back from Jules.
These gestures signaled to him the end of their meeting. He felt depressed at once. “You’re really going to call me?” he said.
“Yes.”
They stood. Jules’s sadness flowed into her, and she stepped into his embrace, weeping. They held each other. Jules felt her warm, slightly damp, intense body beneath his hands and wondered if, inside her, still, was that deliberate perverse purity, that obscene purity, she had prized years ago. Did she go about the objects of her life thinking, Nadine Greene is walking here undefiled, to the left of this, to the right of that, precise and virginal? He understood that his rival was not her husband, who was a kind of ally, being a man, but this woman’s image of herself as a woman, her melancholy frigidity.
“You don’t want to love me maybe,” he said softly, accusingly.
“That isn’t true.”
“You want to make a pattern of us. Like moving children’s blocks around on the floor.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“You don’t want to give yourself to me.”
“I love you, I think of you constantly, I’m sick with love for you—what more can you want? I’m trapped by my love for you.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“I feel that I could go crazy with it, Jules, it’s nothing I had any choice in and I resent it.”
She stood weeping in his arms; they had nothing more to say. Jules looked around for their image in the bureau mirror as if to prove to himself that they were standing here, just so, this woman in his arms, the two of them rigid and baffled.
After she left he checked out of the hotel at once and went to a bar, where he had several drinks. A dark depression was upon him. He hadn’t the energy to drive out to his uncle’s plant, as he had promised the old man; instead he telephoned. He said, “I have to go out to the hospital again today. Drive my mother out. Yes. No, not yet. Pretty sick. Yes. Cancer.” A respectful pause. Uncle Samson respected cancer and money. “Yes, thank you. I’m sorry about today. I don’t particularly like what I have to do. Thank you. Yes. Good-by. Yes. Cancer of the lymph nodes or something, some kind of cancer. No, not from smoking. No.”
13
Two weeks passed. Jules waited.
When she finally called he had grown skeptical, and her voice sounded improbable: a chance connection. She seemed to be reading off to him a certain address, a certain time. Writing this information down, he leaned forward to press his forehead against the wall. In his entire body there was nothing firm, nothing to stop him from falling except that wall.
He left early so that he would not have to drive fast. His mind, filled with inconsequential news of his uncle’s office and public life, kept back the excitement that threatened to overtake him. Driving, he seemed to pass into a kind of trance, keeping the vocabulary of his ordinary life but absolved of its meanings. No matter what he did, Jules felt, he could not be blamed, he could not bear the consequences of real life; he was not a character in “real life.” He put on the twelve o’clock news in order to check up on the real world, which seemed much the same. So he could think with relief, I’ve been through this before.
His life for the past two weeks had not been properly lived. He had struggled with Nadine as with a drowning woman, imagining her constantly. The battle was silent and secret and had no true adversary, because Nadine had dropped out of sight—he had tried to call her but she hadn’t answered. He had hung up, relieved. But her presence was all about him, the way the scent of her had been on him, a light, airy touch of doom. He argued with himself. He spoke of himself in the third person; he addressed himself desperately, saying, “Jules, you’ve got to get out of this!” But the essential Jules, the deeper, wiser, Jules, did no more than say constantly, How could you live with yourself if
you weren’t equal to this?—To this emotion?
The apartment she had rented was on the fifth floor of an old apartment building near Palmer Park. It was made of dark red brick, heavy and pompous, with small useless balconies of wrought iron. The balconies were only symbolic, ceremonial. At the four corners of the building were grimy turrets, inexplicable. To Jules they had a military look, but he knew nothing about architecture and could not have said what they were or what they had once been, in another century. They made him apprehensive. Only pigeons fluttered heavily about them, but he expected to see the nervous movement of weapons. His chest flinched at the thought of such a death. Did he want to die shot down, or did he want to die in a hospital bed like his uncle? His imagination had been heated by the memory of movies, stark black-and-white deaths of men shot down, always shot down; it was the price that had to be paid for being important. Jules was too important to himself, too much alone. As a child he had sensed that in the movies a sudden noisy death would take place whenever a man was alone for two or three minutes; he unwisely left his companions, he whistled to himself as he opened a safe or changed his shirt, alone, and in a minute the camera would shift slyly to show a gun barrel…
This building impressed him. In the air, as if stirred by his presence, there was a sudden odor of dust; it was an odor he thought strange and elegant. He had smelled dirt often enough but never this kind of clean, acrid, clear, invisible dust. The elevator was antiquated. It moved reluctantly. He was accustomed to fast-moving, silent elevators, he was accustomed to escalators, to the functioning of efficient machines. The very slowness of this elevator charmed him.
When he got out on the fifth floor he suddenly lost his nerve. It was in a dream he moved toward her door…he saw the door open. The crack widened, teasingly. He stared at it as if staring at a movie screen. The symmetry of the door was being destroyed; it was a door of dark wood and it looked expensive to him. Everything looked expensive to him here. He reached out to touch the door, and Nadine took his hand. He came to her, wordless, and buried his face against the hollow of her shoulder and throat.